Heinrich Wandt

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Heinrich Wandt in the Ghent stage, 1916.

Heinrich Wandt (born May 13, 1890 in Stuttgart , † March 22, 1965 in Berlin-Schöneberg ) was a German author and publicist .

Life

Wandt broke off his architecture studies and at the age of 19 became the private secretary of Clara Zetkin , with whose sons he had been on friendly terms since childhood. At the same time he wrote for various social democratic newspapers.

In 1912/13 he did military service and then worked as a journalist in Paris . On the German side, he took part in the First World War from 1914 in France and off Ypres . Due to a wound, he was no longer able to be used in the front. In 1915 he was assigned to the staff of the stage inspection of the 4th Army in Ghent , Belgium . After the war he worked as an editor.

He kept a diary about crimes during the war, which the left-wing Berlin Free Press published weekly in excerpts from January 1920. The full name of the officers involved prompted the Reichswehr Ministry to investigate in July 1920.

Libel processes

On December 21, 1920, Wandt was sentenced to 6 months in prison by the Berlin-Moabit criminal chamber in a trial for confusing his name. In another trial, an arrest warrant was issued against him on September 6, 1921. From October 1921 to the end of January 1922 he was a remand prisoner in Potsdam. He bowed to a settlement, as a result of which the prison sentence was suspended.

At the same time his collected notes appeared as the Ghent stage . The book aroused great public interest in Belgium and Holland. In Germany it was sold around 200,000 times until the new edition in 1926.

Wandt was then personally threatened, robbed and covered with further charges of libel. He received files for his defense from the processing office of the Guard Corps in Spandau. He was charged with this fact as 'inciting serious theft and attempted disclosure of military secrets'. Arrested again in March 1922, he escaped to Holland and later Belgium .

In the summer of 1922, the German Reich government was forced to counter the murder of two German officers (Rickolt Freiherr von Gagern and Prince Udo zu Stolberg-Wernigerode-Uslar) of the Belgian Baron d'Udekem d'Acoz, described in the Ghent stage, with a trivializing official account .

High treason trial

On January 26, 1923, Wandt was forcibly deported to Potsdam from occupied Düsseldorf , in which political criminal cases in unoccupied Germany could not be carried out . He was accused of having given the interrogation protocol of a Flemish prisoner of war ( Adiel Debeukelaere ), drawn up by German intelligence officers in 1918, to a Belgian ( Armand Wallus 'Flamenpolitik') for publication. The information should come from the inventory of the processing center of the Guard Corps in Spandau or the Reichsarchiv Potsdam .

The trial, then known as the 'German Dreyfus Trial', took place on December 13, 1923 before the Reichsgericht Leipzig . The hearing was secret, and those present were obliged to maintain confidentiality. The prosecution stated that they were unable to provide evidence of diplomatic treason against Wandt. The court dismissed the defendant's objections and evidence. Three German intelligence officers who had already been questioned on the same facts by a Belgian court martial escaped the summons of witnesses by the Reich Court by fleeing abroad. Wandt was sentenced to six years in prison and ten years of loss of honor .

Wandt was convinced that the threat by the former military during the first trials 'to bring him down soon' had been implemented by means of Major Wilhelm Staehle , a former intelligence officer who was employed in the Reichswehr Ministry and who appeared at the trial as both an expert and a witness.

Wandt was imprisoned in Küstrin and released early in 1926 under pressure from the Belgian public. He documented the trials in 1927 in Der Gefangene von Potsdam .

Life after discharge

In 1936 he was in Basel , as can be seen from a handwritten book dedication. In 1945 he took part in the first list of literature to be sorted out , an assignment to free the libraries in the Soviet occupation zone , including Berlin, from the Nazi demon . When the works of Trotskyists and anarchists , but also erotic , esoteric and books from the non-communist peace movement were to be removed from the next lists (there were four in total with up to 400 pages) , he withdrew from this project.

In 1984 (?) His widow Alice Wandt was robbed and murdered by a drug addict. The estate administrator did not find an heir and finally had the apartment and, above all, its basement swept clean, in which Heinrich Wandt's archive, which had been saved from the Nazi era, was piled high in boxes. In this way his reference library, rare documents from the First World War, correspondence with Erich Mühsam , Rudolf Rocker , Magnus Hirschfeld , Ernst Toller and many other free spirits and opponents of the war ended up on the West Berlin flea market and were scattered all over the world.

Works

  • Stage Gent. Side lights to collapse . Berlin, book publisher of the "Freie Presse", 1921 (also published in Dutch and French)
  • Eroticism and espionage in the Gent stage " . 1928, (= Gent stage, volume 2), Vienna-Berlin, Agis-Verlag , 1928. (These books, which were reprinted again and again until 1933, are available with various dust jackets , with a variant by John Heartfield , showing an officer drinking champagne with a prostitute on his lap, was instantly confiscated.
  • The Prisoner of Potsdam , 2 volumes, Agis-Verlag, Vienna and Berlin 1927.
  • Moral history of the world war edited by Medical Councilor Dr. Magnus Hirschfeld . Head of the Institute for Sexology in Berlin. With contributions from Prof. Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss , Dr. Herbert Lewandowski , Heinrich Wandt a. a. Verlag für Sexualwissenschaft, Schneider und Co., Vienna, Leipzig 1930, 416 pages.
  • Reflection and departure . Articles in the membership magazine of the FAUD Book Guild (AS), Berlin 1929–1933.

Movie

In 1959, the television film Weimar Pitaval: Der Fall Wandt , which deals with the life of Wandt, was made as part of the television series Fernsehpitaval .

literature

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Wandt, Heinrich
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German author and publicist
DATE OF BIRTH May 13, 1890
PLACE OF BIRTH Stuttgart
DATE OF DEATH March 22, 1965
Place of death Schöneberg